Chuck Palahniuk, slowly turning into the guy from Mythbusters, apparently.

It doesn’t seem like it’s been two years since Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk’s last book, but apparently it has. Time really flies when you don’t get around to reading stuff.  Anyhoot, he’s got a new one coming out yesterday called Tell-All.  [Slight update: Pygmy actually came out last year. Dude writes fast.] Described as “Palahniuk’s rude sendup of name-dropping and the culture of celebrity worship revolves around the fate of Katherine Kenton, a much-married star of stage, screen, and television, living in obscurity and searching for a comeback vehicle,” the Onion A/V Club has downloadable PDFs of the first two chapters.  Here’s an excerpt:

Act one, scene one opens with Lillian Hellman clawing her
way, stumbling and scrambling, through the thorny night-
time underbrush of some German schwarzwald, a Jewish
baby clamped to each of her tits, another brood of infants
clinging to her back. Lilly clambers her way, struggling
against the brambles that snag the gold embroidery of her
Balenciaga lounging pajamas, the black velvet clutched by
hordes of doomed cherubs she’s racing to deliver from the
ovens of some Nazi death camp. More innocent toddlers,
lashed to each of Lillian’s muscular thighs. Helpless Jew-
ish, Gypsy and homosexual babies. Nazi gestapo bullets spit
past her in the darkness, shredding the forest foliage, the
smell of gunpowder and pine needles. The heady aroma of
her Chanel No. 5. Bullets and hand grenades just whiz past
Miss Hellman’s perfectly coiffed Hattie Carnegie chignon, so
close the ammunition shatters her Cartier chandelier earrings
into rainbow explosions of priceless diamonds. Ruby and em-
erald shrapnel blasts into the flawless skin of her perfect, pale
cheeks. . . [Check out the rest]

Aw, you had me at “homosexual babies.”  Occasionally I’ll be drawn into a Palahniuk book and proceed to tear through it, only to reach an ending that’s kind of unsatisfying and lame.  But at the least, he always nails the first part.  Unlike that fat a-hole Dr. Phil*, always telling me to lose weight and get my life together, you’re so preachy, dude, seriously.

*On a slightly related note, I checked Amazon while I was writing this and the guy has written 13 books.  Are human beings actually reading these?  He’s a big fat guy who writes weight loss books.  A good way to tell if you’ve failed at life is if you’re reading a Dr. Phil book.

I noticed this the first time I watched the trailer but I didn’t say anything for some reason, and now a bunch of other sites have beaten me to the punch.  Anyway, the “controversy” is that there’s a scene in The Final Destination in which one of the characters has his intestines sucked out of his butthole by a pool drain.  Which, depending on how you look at it, is a ripoff of Chuck Palahniuk’s short story “Guts” which appears in Haunted and was published in Playboy and other places.  Is it a ripoff?  Is it an homage?  Does it even matter, since Palahniuk’s story was itself based on a fairly well-known urban legend (update: okay, I guess it’s not a legend since it’s actually happened a few times)?

There’s also a scene in the movie in which they zoom in really fast on a character’s eyeball to show that he’s psychic, one of my favorite movie clichés.  I’d like to see a quick-eyeball-zoom on Gary Busey, except it just fades into a family of squirrels playing beach volleyball.  I digress, but join me after the jump, where I’ll spoil both the ending of the Palahniuk story and the pool scene in the movie.  But if you honestly care about me spoiling The Final Destination, I hate you and I hope you die.

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New School has optioned Chuck Palahniuk’s book Haunted with Belgian director Koen Mortier attached to the project.  You may remember Mortier from his work on Ex Drummer, or 10 jaar leuven kort, which I believe roughly translates to “10 Chicks Pissing”.  Or something like that.  I’m not too good with Dutch, all I know is that they have really stinky ovens (whackety schmackety dooo…).

Haunted looks to be a challenging work to adapt, since the chapters in the book, although tied together with a skeleton narrative, are mainly stand-alone short stories, one of which being the world famous “Guts”.  Palahnuik calls the project, “Very much in the vein of Fight Club, but with more people getting their guts sucked out their asshole by the pool drain.”

[Variety via /Film]

^{Hehe, “flaming”.}

Opening this weekend

Eagle Eye – Well, we already know what everyone thinks about this one.  Still, I hope it doesn’t flop too badly, if only for the sake of monkey army morale.

Choke - Sam Rockwell? Chuck Palahniuk? Sex addiction? Historical interpreting?  Yes, please.  Polite suggestion: needs more tigers.

Miracle at St. Anna - You know how back in WWII, white motherf-ckers be all savin’ Italians like this?  But then a brother comes along and he’s all like…

Nights in Rodanthe - Mmm, old people love scenes, my favorite.  Her puffy vag, his old… balls, lovingly lit, accompanied by lilting string music.  Seriously, where do I sign up?

Fireproof – He proved the existence of God with a banana, just imagine what he can do to your marriage with a firehose.  Wait, that came out wrong…

More clips are out for the adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke.  I have two different sources: Collider‘s clips are higher quality, but imeem‘s are all on one page.  Choose wisely.

The newest clips introduce Anjelica Huston’s character, playing the dysfunctional mother of Sam Rockwell’s character.  She’s especially good in the Look There’s My Show clip.  I still can’t decide if Anjelica is a hot GILF or is trying to lure me into a gingerbread house.